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Lightroom Update Deletes Photos and Presets on iPhone and iPad

By Laura Tucker
News Lightroom Update Featured

Despite the prevalence of cloud storage, There are still people who don’t trust having their data and personal information stored somewhere they can’t see. However, not using the cloud doesn’t always work out either. People who installed this week’s Adobe Lightroom update for iPhone and iPad found that it deleted all the photos and presets they had stored on their device.

Lightroom Update Deletes Everything

It needs to be repeated just to be sure the depth of this issue is clear: the Lightroom update for iOS, version 5.4, had a bug that deleted photos and presets. And there’s nothing they can do to get them back. Imagine!

Users of the iOS Lightroom app started expressing their frustration on forums that the update had killed all their creations. If the users did routine backups to the Lightroom cloud, of course they didn’t lose much. But if they didn’t, they lost it all … for good. One user said they lost more than 8,000 photos.

While there is a free and a pro version of Lightroom, it appears this bug affected both versions. That may make it worse. It’s one thing to lose everything on something you were getting for free, but to lose everything on something you were paying for might just push some people over the edge.

“All of my photos and presets are gone,” wrote a user. “When will this be fixed? Even purchased presets are gone! How do I et my photos and presets back?” The answer is you can’t.

News Lightroom Update Whats New

The good news is that Adobe has fixed the app and pushed out another update already. The bad news is even if you install the update with the bug fix, it’s still not going to restore your lost photos.

Adobe Response

“We are aware that some customers who updated to Lightroom 5.4 on iPhone and iPad may be missing photos and presets that were not synced to the Lightroom cloud,” said Adobe. “A new version of Lightroom mobile (5.4.1) for iOS and iPadOS has now been released that prevents this issue from affecting additional customers.”

The company further upset users by telling them, “installing version 5.4.1 will not restore missing photos or presets.” Adobe did “sincerely apologize” to anyone affected by the bug, but that doesn’t restore the photos.

If there’s any solace at all, Lightroom users can at least find sympathy from Canon users. Canon recently launched a new “camera cloud platform,” then took it down after it was realized that some photos and videos had been lost.

If you’re a little bugged out by this Lightroom update issue, consider these alternatives.. But if you’re specifically looking for something for iPhone or iPad, try these photo-editing apps for iOS.

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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